Author Archive: Phillip Bohl

For those of you who are in law practice or hope to be in the near future, it is becoming clear that you will want to exercise every advantage you can to make your contributions as a lawyer as competitive and innovative as you can.

As in many professions, the use of technology to leverage your skills to greater efficiency is a boon to law practice.

Lexis and Westlaw and now Bloomberg Law are anxious to stay relevant in a world that is in an app frenzy. Not to say that many apps are not valuable, in fact there are myriad apps that address specific needs very well.

Lexis Nexis’ release of TextMap for iPad leverages this mobile platform for those reviewing transcripts in TextMap 6.2 . If you are not familiar with TextMap, it is a transcript summary tool most commonly used for summarizing deposition transcripts.

This product is a far cry from what we used for deposition summaries back in the early 1990’s when I was a young law student looking for extra work … “Depo summaries my boy! That’s what you should do!” At least we had WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS back then — much better than a manual typewriter — I’m not THAT old. But in the end it was high pay, highly manual, and high eye strain! A terrific combination! I couldn’t hack it.

Facts of life: There will be depositions in law practice. Where there are depositions, there will be transcripts. Where there are transcripts there will be transcript summaries.

Yes, you can hire someone to take the transcripts for you but in the end, every party needs their own depo summaries. Who’s gong to summarize your depo transcripts? You? Get a tool. TextMap is a popular solution and now with the iPad app, you can do it on the run (while you are sitting in the hall outside the courtroom waiting for the next thing to happen).

This is not an endorsement for TextMap. Think of it as more of an endorsement of getting tools that work for you. In the end, I found that I wasn’t cut out for depo summaries at all so I’m hardly the person to recommend any product in this area BUT if it makes it easier, I’m a fan. It’s certainly worth a look.